GIS Blog

The Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES) contacted the GIS department to summarize land designations for the expanse of land held in the Roaring Fork Watershed. The Forest Health Index reports the acres of protected land in the watershed. This includes US Forest Service, BLM, Colorado/State land and down to local protections of land from Pitkin County Open Space.

The Roaring Fork Watershed spills over the Pitkin County line into Eagle, Garfield, and Gunnison Counties. The GIS Department was able to use the Colorado Ownership and Management Protection dataset (COMap V8) to analyze the area’s makeup of land. This gave ACES an estimate of the total protected lands. Here are the results of the study:

Total Roaring Fork watershed/basin “protected” Land- including Eagle, Garfield, Pitkin, and Gunnison County using COMap Version 8:

The Wheeler Opera House hosted an evening with famed nature photographer, John Fielder as part of a state wide tour celebrating 20 years of accomplishments in conservation and protection of open space lands throughout Colorado using State lottery funds. John Fielder was on hand to present a lecture and slide show of photographs featuring lands purchased by GOCO.

To help highlight these GOCO funded lands within Pitkin County, the Aspen/Pitkin GIS department produced a map that shows the 15,000 acres of preservation land, nearly 40 miles of trails, and various snapshots of such properties in the county. The map was on display for guests to reference as John projected his highly talented photos of these preserves.